As the luggage of a modest lady's-maid it was really too eccentric-looking to display to the suspicious eyes of the four men who waited there in Miss Million's sitting-room confronting me. I protested incoherently: "Oh, I don't think I can let you——"
"Ah!" said the stout Jewish gentleman, with a vicious glance from me to the Scotland Yard detective, "this don't seem a case of a very clear conscience!"
The manager put up a deprecating hand.
"A little quietly, sir, if you please. I am sure Miss Smith will see that it is quite as much for her own benefit to let us just give a bit of a look through her things."
Her "things!" There, again, was something rather embarrassing. The fact was I had so ridiculously few things. No dress at all but the well-cut, brand-new gown that I stood up in; one hat, one jacket, and two pairs of expensive shoes, three changes of underclothes, and silk stockings. All were good, but all so obviously just out of the shop! There was absolutely nothing about them to link their owner to any past before she came to the hotel!
For the fact is that when I sent my boxes and hold-all away I had also repudiated every stitch of the very shabby clothing that had been mine while I was not Miss Million's maid, but her mistress. The ne'er-do-well serge skirts, the makeshift "Jap" silk blouses with no "cut" about them, the underclothes, all darned and patched, the much-mended stockings, once black cashmere but now faded to a kind of myrtle-green—all, all had gone to swell two bulky parcels which I had put up and sent off to The Little Sisters of the Poor!
I had heaved a sigh of delight as I had handed those parcels over the post-office counter. It had been the fulfilment of the wish of years!
I expect every hard-up girl knows that impulse, that mad longing that she could make a perfectly clean sweep of every single stitch she possesses to wear! How rapturously she would send it all, all away! Oh, her joy if she might make an entirely new start—with all fresh clothes; good ones, pretty ones, becoming ones! Clothes that she would enjoy wearing, even if there were only so very few of them!
In my case they were so few that I really did not feel that they could support any sort of kit-inspection. Especially under the eyes of mere male men, who never do understand anything that has to do with our attire.
There I stood, in the only frock I had got, in the only other apron and cap (all exquisite of their kind, mind you!), and I said falteringly: "I am very sorry to be disobliging! But I cannot consent to let you search my things, or open my boxes."